Who? What? Where? When? How? Why? The answers to these and other questions are very easy to answer when we remember the sad events in the Maze Prison, Belfast (Northern Ireland) in 1981. The story is known, was told in newspapers and has already booked a chapter in any encyclopedia of the twentieth century: Bobby Sands, IRA activist, began a hunger strike as a form of oo protest treatment of prisoners from that prison, claiming the status of political prisoner. Skin and bone, Sands was to die shortly afterwards of a heart attack, becoming a symbol of the struggle of that group.
Now, in 2008, the British artist Steve McQueen recreates the events experienced in the Maze prison that year. "Hunger" is the story from the inside, that it was impossible to reproduce in newspapers and encyclopedias and not fall on mannerisms epics, too plastic, typical of Hollywood. An unabashed exercise, violent, filthy, that reveals the decadence, the rituals that were subject humilhaçãoa dozens of prisoners from that prison and taken to an extreme faith by someone who refused to live under those conditions. Somewhere between the martyr, the hero or the anti-hero, Bobby Sands is here portrayed as one who was aware only of their beliefs and the effects of their decisions.
From here, McQueen gets in the story with artist's hand and makes it a true treatise on human suffering, its limits and its convictions. Without making any value judgments, exposes the facts with a remarkable distance and puts the human condition in the action. The events that led to the hunger strike of Bobby Sands, the political context of Northern Ireland or life outside those four walls, are just the Trojan horse of the actual battle that Steve Mcqueen want here reveal. Actually, Bobby Sands is just his scapegoat and history true could be just a figment of the imagination.
Except for a dialogue between Sands and a majestic priest, where the militant IRA explains why decide to go on hunger strike, gives Mcqueen total primacy to the image and feeling that it conveys, in an exercise where one notices a clear aesthetic vision of an artist. The use of ad hoc technical details sãoa delicious piece de resistance a movie whose sole intention is, deep down, that translate into images that imaginaçãoe words can not convey. The best punch in the stomach of the year.
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